I saw Highlander 2:  The Quickening in the theater without the benefit of seeing the first film and it was so bad that I swore off ever watching the original (or the slew of sequels and various TV shows and spin-offs for that matter).  In fact, I used to make fun of people for liking this movie.   Over the years I would catch part of it here and there on television but I’d remember my promise and quickly turn it off.  After a two decade long embargo, I finally decided to check it out.  Now that I’ve seen it all way through I have to say it’s pretty badass.  Flawed and overlong; but badass nonetheless.

Connor Macleod (Christopher Lambert) is a Scottish dude in the 15^th century who gets mortally wounded in battle but doesn’t die.  His clan thinks he’s touched by the devil so they cast him out of their village.  Then along comes this Spaniard swordsman (Sean Connery) who tells Connor that he’s actually immortal and trains him how to use a sword so that other immortals don’t try to knock his block off.  Then some burly looking motherfucker named Krueger (Clancy Brown) tracks them down and kills Connor’s teacher.  Centuries later, in modern day New York, Krueger finally finds Macleod and they have a knock down drag out swordfight because “THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!”

Highlander was directed by Russell Mulcahy and it’s definitely one of the most stylish looking sci-fi action flicks of the 80’s.  What can I say?  The man just knows how to film swordfights and people getting struck by lighting.  He also did a good job at incorporating the Godfather 2 style flashbacks into the narrative.

Of course he still doesn’t explain the film’s biggest plot hole:  How can immortals be “immortal” if they can be killed by decapitation?  You probably got to ask someone at a Starlog convention to get a straight answer to that.

What makes the movie work is the chemistry between Lambert and Connery.  You can’t beat the sight of James Bond dressed like a 15^th century Spanish pimp teaching Tarzan how to swordfight.  These scenes are kinda like a cross between the training montages in Rocky and the scenes where Luke learns the Force from Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars.  That is to say they rock.  Speaking of “rock”; the non-stop Queen music isn’t up to snuff with their stellar work from Flash Gordon but middle of the road Queen is still better than no Queen at all

The constant swordfights and decapitations aside, Highlander isn’t perfect.  The pacing starts to flag about 2/3 of the way through and almost comes to a screeching halt when Lambert starts playing kissy-face with a forensics expert broad.  These little detours aren’t enough to completely derail the film and the rousing climax makes you forget about that dopey lovey-dovey subplot.  Besides, any movie that features a random ass cameo by The Fabulous Freebirds is OK by me.

Suggested Drinking Game:  Take a shot every time somebody says, “There can be only one!”

Brown gets the best line of the movie when he says, “Nuns… no sense of humor!”

Chance Buckman (John Wayne) is a fireman who specializes in putting out oil-rig fires. During a job, he accidentally gets a bulldozer in the back and winds up in the hospital. His estranged daughter (Katharine Ross) comes to visit him and falls in love with Chance’s business partner (Jim Hutton, father of Timothy); which predictably puts a strain on everybody’s relationship.

Hellfighters was loosely based on the exploits of famed firefighter Red Adair. While a movie about firemen SEEMS like a good idea (Backdraft was decent enough), Hellfighters doesn’t really cut it. The firefighting sequences are pretty spectacular but they are all more or less interchangeable. Also, most of the “dramatic” meat of the story revolves around Wayne and Hutton constantly telling Ross that an oil fire is no place for a dame. These sub-soap operatic scenes effectively put a damper on any kind of heat that the firefighting sequences managed to generate. It also doesn’t help that Wayne’s character disappears for a good chunk of the movie.

Some things in the flick stood out though. I kinda liked the way Hutton brought girls over to watch him fight fires as a form of foreplay. There was also an OK bar fight scene; although admittedly The Duke has been in better. And dopey dramatics aside, Wayne and Hutton (who also appeared in The Green Berets the same year) have a good chemistry together; which keeps you watching, even when things slow down to a crawl.

A rich couple invites two slimeballs (Last House on the Left’s David Hess and The Gates of Hell’s Giovanni Radice) to their swanky party.  Their stuck-up guests make fun of the duo and try to cheat them at cards, which really pisses off the pair of psychos.  They then proceed to torture and rape the female guests while beating the crap out of the dudes.  Predictably, the high-class victims eventually get the upper hand and exact their revenge.

The House on the Edge of the Park could’ve been a classic of the genre but it never completely comes together because the rich antagonists aren’t very likeable and in my opinion; get what’s coming to them.  I mean you can’t invite David Hess and Giovanni Radice to your party and not expect them to RSVP.  (Rape Somebody Very Perversely.) 

If you’re a David Hess fan, you’re immediately obliged to see The House on the Edge of the Park.  His charismatically nutzo turn is almost as good as his immortal performance in Last House on the Left.  He also gets what has to be the longest comeuppances of a villain in the history of cinema.

The flick is scary and has a number of shocks but it plays it’s cards too soon and the protracted finale doesn’t do it any favors either.  The way the tables constantly turn between the partygoers and the psychos is still intriguing though.  Director Ruggero (Cannibal Holocaust) Deodato really knows how to film David Hess acting all kinds of unhinged and that alone is enough to make the film a memorably sleazy Italian exploitation item.

Jean Claude Van Damme stars as an Iraq war veteran who returns home suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.  To help him get back on his feet, Van Damme’s old army buddy gets him a job as a bodyguard for an ex-boxer.  The former champ has a long-standing grudge against a vindictive rapper and when the lethal lyricist gets out of prison, he sets out to pop a cap in the popular pugilist’s ass.  It’s up to Van Damme to protect him against the gangsta’s wrath.

The Hard Corps started life as a vehicle for Steven Seagal and DMX; so if you keep that in mind you might know what to expect.  It actually plays a little like a modern day blaxploitation movie with Van Damme in the lead.  (The only two other white people in the flick are JCVD’s right hand man and a crooked cop.)  In fact when Van Damme gets hired, his new boss jokingly says, “Isn’t it time we had some Affirmative Action around here?”

While it’s fun seeing Van Damme gun down a bunch of gangsta rappers, the film gets bogged down early on and goes south rather quickly.  The action is sporadic and severely inflated running time (110 minutes) drains the flick of a lot of much needed momentum.  And since the beef is mostly between the rapper and the boxer, Van Damme’s character doesn’t have much of a stake in the action.  Sure, he kinda has the hots for the boxer’s sister (Vivica A. Fox) but that’s about it.  It also doesn’t help when Van Damme has war flashbacks every fifteen minutes or so.

Sheldon Lettich, who has previously directed Van Damme in Lionheart, Double Impact, and Legionnaire, films the action in a workmanlike manner.  Although the flick is light on action, Lettich does deliver at least one good fight sequence when JCVD’s employer fires him and they have a knockdown drag-out brawl.  Van Damme was obviously comfortable with Lettich behind the camera because he gives one of his most relaxed performances in some time.  However, it’s still not enough to rise The Hard Corps above the usual Van Damme Direct to DVD mediocrity.

A guy sees his hot daughter (Abigail Wolcott) get killed by unruly bikers in the 50’s and gets revenge by chopping them up with an axe.  Later, he finds a magic crystal that has the power to bring dead bats back to life (as well as make turtles and goldfish explode).  Naturally, he uses that hunk of rock to resurrect daddy’s little girl.  Forty years later, the dead daughter goes around picking up hitchhikers and lures them back to her father’s tourist trap western-themed ghost town.  Four college kids make a wrong turn and wind up in the ghost town and the sexy succubus sets her sights on turning the ringleader (Ron Palillo, Horshack from Welcome Back Kotter!) into her new loverboy.

Hellgate’s narrative is clunky because it keeps hopping back and forth from the 80’s to the 50’s.  It has a lot of good ideas but director William A. (Blackenstein) Levey doesn’t make too many of them stick.  Still, how many movies do you know of feature exploding turtles and goldfish?  Wolcott gets naked a lot and the gore (decapitated heads, axes into the skull, etc.) is passable, so there’s always something to keep you interested.

You know, I was going to deduct One Star from this movie because it showed me Horshack buck ass naked.  On second thought, I decided not to since very few horror films are actually horrifying.  And let me tell ya something folks; seeing Horshack naked is the true meaning of horror.

Palillo also starred in Levey’s Skatetown, USA.

Japanese gangsters start disappearing left and right, leaving only their clothes behind.  A bimbo nightclub singer witnesses one of the thugs dissolving but of course, the cops don’t believe her.  Eventually we learn that a giant slime monster (a product of the H-Bomb) is on the loose and going around melting folks.  Scientists scramble to find a way to stop the creature and finally come up with the bright idea of flamethrowering the shit out of it.

The H-Man is a goofy monster.  It looks like a cross between The Blob and a mass of KY Jelly.  Sometimes it takes a mannish shape but mostly it just slops itself around.  Since it’s just a big pile of goo, it doesn’t have a lot of personality.  However, the dissolving people effects are kinda cool (they resemble blow-up dolls covered in liquid Dial soap) and the endless scenes of scientists melting frogs in a lab are pretty funny.

You can see where all of this may have been fun but The H-Man doesn’t have quite what it takes to be completely successful.  The big problem is that director Inoshiro (Godzilla) Honda’s pacing is so damn constipated.  I mean it takes a freaking half an hour for the monster to even show up.  Before that you have to sit through a lot of nonsense involving gangsters and detectives as well as a bunch of lame nightclub acts and dance routines.  As with most Japanese monster mashes; the ridiculous dubbing is good for a laugh or two.

AKA:  Beauty and the Liquidman.

The Hollywood Knights is basically a rehash of American Graffiti.  Except the acting and directing isn’t as good.  It does have a bunch of titties in it though so that makes it watchable.

Just like American Graffiti, there isn’t any plot; just a bunch of nostalgic interconnected incidents revolving around a group of teens over the course of a single night.  We get drag racing, mooning, and a lot of excessive loitering at a drive-in restaurant.  We also get pissing in the punchbowl and nerdy band leader hazing.  All of this happens while the soundtrack blares the requisite wall-to-wall oldies.

The characters are basically the same too.  There’s the guy who’s going away to Vietnam, the prankster, the gearhead, the cool DJ, and the nerd.  As in American Graffiti, most of the actors playing these roles went on to bigger and better things.  Among them are Tony Danza, Michelle Pfeiffer, Robert Wuhl, and Fran Dresher.

A lot of the humor is sophomoric and although nothing in the flick comes close to matching American Graffiti, it’s sorta funny.  The highlight comes when some pledges are made to walk through Watts buck ass naked in the middle of the night.  They grab a couple sheets off a clothesline and wrap themselves up.  Predictably, they are mistaken for the KKK.  Hilarity ensues.

Danza is the “star” of the movie but he isn’t really given a whole lot to do besides whine at Pfeiffer a lot.  Wuhl comes off best as the jokester of the group who pulls off a lot of pranks.  He gets the most screen time of anyone and says all the funniest lines like, “Did you hear about the guy with five penises?  His pants fit like a glove!”

Quasimodo the Hunchback (Lon Chaney) is the deformed bell ringer for the Notre Dame Cathedral.  Some tyrant motherfucker forces him into kidnapping a cute gypsy girl named Esmeralda (Patty Ruth Miller) but Quasimodo gets caught red handed and is sentenced to be whipped in public.  The gypsy chick doesn’t bare a grudge though and gives him some water after his beating.  When Esmeralda gets framed for a crime and sentenced to death, Quasi pays her back for her kindness and comes to the rescue.  Of course, like all ugly dudes in movies that pine for foxy females, his love goes unrequited.

I’m going to get this off my chest right away.  The Hunchback of Notre Dame features way too many idiotic supporting characters, too much palace intrigue, and enough dopey lovey dovey bullshit to make you wanna vomit.  BUT… it comes highly recommended because it features Lon Chaney giving one of his best performances.  He’s great in this movie.  He’s always doing something like jumping up and down, climbing on the outside of the cathedral, ringing the bells, sticking his tongue out; he really goes for broke.  The finale where he pours a vat of molten lead on a horde of motherfuckers is pretty legit too.

Chaney’s make-up is equally impressive.  In addition to the fucked-up hump on his back, he’s got a giant nose, a Ronald McDonald wig, and this big old bulging eye that looks gnarly as shit.  Then there’s the scene where he gets his shirt torn off and you can see his nasty chest hair.  It’s for this image and this image alone that I’m going to categorize this movie as “Horror” rather than “Drama”.

When an undercover agent gets killed trying to bring down a big time opium ring, Roc Tien is called in to investigate.  He goes around beating the tar out of people and acting cool for about 80 minutes until he comes face to face with the big boss man.  It goes without saying that Roc kills him since he has Hands of Death.

I am totally unfamiliar with Roc Tien but he seems like a pretty cool guy to me.  He’s proficient during his fight scenes and has a generous amount of charisma.  Roc also directed this bad boy and he stages the action rather well, although some of the bad guys are kinda shoddy at Kung Fu.

What really knocks the movie down a notch is that it never quite knows what it wants to be.  It starts out as more or less a spy picture (it even reuses some music cues from Diamonds Are Forever) then it turns into a Kung Fu flick, then it goes back to more spy stuff.  I think if old Roc could’ve made the plot transitions a bit smoother, Hands of Death could’ve been pretty tight.  I’m still giving him the benefit of the doubt though because he’s cool in front of the camera.  I wouldn’t turn down the opportunity to see another Roc flick, that’s for sure.

What I dug about the film most was the whole Hands of Death angle.  Roc kills people with one punch to the chest (or back, like in the scene where he disguises himself as a masseur and kills the guy in a steam room) but nothing is ever really made of it.  He never says, “Beware my Hands of Death!”, which I thought showed a lot of composure on his part.  This guy didn’t have to brag about his lethalness, and that was refreshing.  Having said that; I would’ve enjoyed seeing him in a flashback scene at his job interview to be a spy.  I can see it now:

Employer:  “Roc, what makes you think I should hire you over all the other applicants?”

Roc:  “Well boss, I’ve got good people skills; I can type 45 words a minute, plus I got that whole Hands of Death thing going for me…”

AKA:  The Notorious Bandit.  AKA:  The Tongfather. 

Ah yes, remember the days when it was okay to make your iconic movie monster SCARY without giving him a whole bunch of bullshit back story and cheesy one-liners?  Pinhead (Doug Bradley) is that kind of monster and Hellraiser is that kind of movie.  He doesn’t get a lot of screen time throughout the film but when he does, look out!

Larry (Andrew Robinson) moves into his brother’s house with his slut wife Julia (Claire Higgins).  What he doesn’t know is that his brother, Frank (Sean Chapman) fucked with the Lament Configuration Puzzle Box and Pinhead and his Cenobite cronies ripped his shit up with a bunch of industrial strength fishing hooks.  When Larry accidentally cuts himself and bleeds on the floor, it brings Frank back to life. 

Well sorta.  Frank’s really just like a bloody blob of bones and bile.  He needs more blood to come all the way back so he enlists the help of Julia (who also happens to be his former lover) to supply him with fresh bodies.  Julia brings home businessmen on their lunch break for a quickie and right when they get their pants off, she brains them with a hammer.  Franks slurps them dry and slowly regains his body back.  Larry’s daughter Kirsty (Ashley Laurence) gets wind of all this and eventually makes a deal with Pinhead to send Frank back to Hell.

Horror author Clive Barker wrote the screenplay (based on his novel “The Hellbound Heart”) and directed this (sick) puppy.  He’s really good at making you care about his characters and even better at scaring the bejabbers out of the audience.  Clive is my kind of director.  I can only imagine some of Clive’s directions on the set like, “Please, could we get MORE slime on Frank’s face?”, or “Now when you peel this dead rat like an orange, could you pull the skin back SLOWLY?” or “Your motivation in this scene is to rip apart this poor bastard with a dozen hooks”. 

Clive was also responsible for creating Pinhead, one of the most memorable screen monsters of the 80’s.  He’s barely in the flick but since his face was all over the movie posters, he became an iconic slasher like Michael Myers and Jason.  The fact that he has little in common with those fellas is beside the point.  I’ve always thought of these screen psychos in terms of single women.  If Michael Myers is the marriage-minded goodie-two-shoes and Jason is 3 AM booty call, then Pinhead is the kinky chick who likes the whips and chains.

Pinhead is actually like the Boba Fett of the movie.  He isn’t given a whole lot to do beside bounty hunt for evil and stand around looking like a badass.  That’s enough though.  Doug Bradley does an incredible job with the character and plays him with a lot of authority and menace.

The main thrust of the story though is the twisted love triangle between cuckold Larry, his whore wife, and his undead brother.  The scenes where Julia must seduce and kill random guys for her lover have a nasty edge to them.  In fact, Frank and Julia’s relationship is a lot more involving than the scenes of Pinhead and his crew fucking shit up.  Don’t get me wrong, I like the Cenobites a lot, but they aren’t nearly as interesting as the demented relationship between Frank and Julia.

After a flawless first hour, Hellraiser kinda stumbles once Pinhead and Co. shows up.  Then it becomes less about the characters and more about special effects.  There’s also some random ass shit in the end that doesn’t make a lick of sense too.  Like the Upside Down Penis Monster.  What was his deal?  And I still don’t know what the fuck was up with that cricket-eating homeless man who caught on fire and became a Dragon Hellbeast either.  I’ll let these lame-o special effects off with a warning though because Frank’s rebirth scene is some of the ickiest grossest shit ever captured on film.  I’ve seen this flick like a dozen times over the past two decades (Damn, am I really that old?) and that shit is still impressive.  You couldn’t CGI that, and if you did, it would look like total ass.

The original Hellraiser is an undisputed classic.  It’s dark, twisted, and unafraid to be a little kinky.  The sequels never recaptured the magic of this one (the Direct to DVD sequels in particular should be avoided at all costs), but that’s fine because it just makes the original that much more unique.

Hellraiser is Number 8 on The Video Vacuum Top Ten Films of the Year for 1987, placing it just below Full Metal Jacket and right above The Hidden.

<Tomorrow’s Horror Franchise Movie:  Child’s Play>

Highway to Hell kinda ties into my month long Horror Movie Franchise marathon because it was written by Brian Helgeland, who penned A Nightmare on Elm Street 4:  The Dream Master and features C.J. Graham, the guy who played Jason in Friday the 13^th Part 6:  Jason Lives.  It’s not very good but it does feature a couple moments of random weirdness to make it at least tolerable.  It was directed by Ate De Jong.  If you’ve never heard of him; he’s the man who directed Drop Dead Fred.  That right there should’ve been a red flag.

Chad Lowe and Kristy Swanson are on their way to elope in Vegas when they take a wrong turn in the desert and end up in Hell.  She gets kidnapped by the scar-faced Hellcop (Graham) and the wimpy Lowe sets out to rescue her.  Along the way, he gets some help from a friendly tow truck driver named Beezle (Patrick Bergin).

If you didn’t immediately figure out that Beezle is actually Beelzebub, the Devil, then you may enjoy it.  

Highway to Hell has some clever moments but the two leads are pretty irritating so it’s hard to care about them.  Lowe is kinda like a poor man’s Mark Hamill and is way too wimpy and annoying to be likeable.  Swanson doesn’t get enough screen time for her character to really register.  When she is on screen however she fails to make much of an impression. 

The supporting cast fares much better.  Bergin is great as the Devil and even manages to makes Old Pitch seem a bit sympathetic.  Graham does a fine job as Hellcop and makes you wish the movie was more about him than the idiot couple.  There’s also a great scene where you see Attila the Hun (Ben Stiller), Cleopatra (Amy Stiller), and Hitler (Gilbert Gottfried!!!) dining together too.  Stiller also pulls double duty as a cook in a zombie diner and is pretty funny.

Highway to Hell has some cool stuff in it.  There’s a strip club where a dancer’s ta-ta’s catch on fire, a guy who pisses green acid, a three-headed dog, and a horny she-devil with giant tits.  And wait until you get a load of Hellcop’s pair of “Hand” Cuffs.  Unfortunately, the flick has way too many potholes in the road to make Highway to Hell worth the trip.  In addition to the two whiny leads, the pacing is hopelessly erratic and there are too many lulls in between the fun stuff.  It also suffers from a pretty shitty ending.  If Highway to Hell is in your movie-watching future, I’d highly advise making a detour.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the first white trash anime movie.  It’s got loads of cartoon boobies, cursing, and ultraviolent gore.  Since it was based on a comic book by Rob Zombie you know it’s going to be uneven as all get out.

El Superbeasto is this Masked Mexican wrestler who spends most of his time making pornos, getting drunk, and acting like an asshole.  Occasionally, he will fight a werewolf or two but mostly he just goes around being a D-Bag.  His crime-fighting partner (and sister) Suzy X mostly does all the heroic shit like fighting Nazi zombies and blowing up Hitler’s living decapitated head.  When El Superbeasto tries to save a hot stripper from the clutches of his arch-nemesis Dr. Satan, Suzy grudgingly agrees to help save the world.

This flick jumps around like a kid with ADD hopped up on Count Chocula cereal.  Zombie keeps cutting back and forth from El Superbeasto and his hot sidekick (who herself has a robot sidekick), which hampers a lot of the film’s momentum.  Once they finally team up though, the movie finds its footing and starts becoming funnier.  The big problem I had with the flick is that Suzy X is a heck of a lot more entertaining than El Superbeasto.  How come Zombie always makes his “heroes” foul-mouthed unlikable assholes?  Beats me.

The humor is crude and sophomoric, bordering on freshmanic.  There is some genuinely funny stuff here though.  I dug Zombie’s references to his own films (Captain Spaulding, Michael Myers and the Werewolf Women of the SS make cameos) as well as the Schoolhouse Rock inspired musical number detailing Dr. Satan’s evil plan.  The best part though is the opening which is basically a word-for-word rip-off of the prologue to the original Frankenstein.  These moments are fleeting but I have to admit they made me laugh.  The bulk of the movie is far too sloppy and/or annoying to give it a full-on recommendation.  However, I can’t bring myself to hate any movie that references Carrie and Benny Hill within the same minute.

<Special Note:  It’s October and that means Halloween is almost here.  If you couldn’t already tell, Halloween is by far my favorite time of the year.  I just like the fact that anyone can dress up like a stark raving lunatic and it’s socially acceptable.  The big reason why I love Halloween though is because that’s when a whole bunch of horror movies start coming on TV.  To celebrate this wonderful time of year I wanted to do something special.  Since I have a soft spot in my heart for all of the major horror franchises, I’m going to try to watch and review one horror sequel (or original) a day for the month of October.  Any Michael Myers, Freddy, Jason, Pinhead, etc. sequels that I haven’t reviewed yet should hopefully be put up on the site one-by-one day-by-day by All Hallow’s Eve.  This is a pretty big undertaking; one that I probably won’t be able to achieve (I’m still working full time and my wife and I are expecting our first baby in the first week of November), but hey we all need goals, right?  To start things off, here’s my review for Halloween 2 (The ORIGINAL Halloween 2, not that Rob Zombie jazz)…>

Halloween is hands down the scariest movie ever made.  Since it made tons of money, a sequel was naturally in order.  By the time it came out though, theaters had been flooded with just about every kind of holiday themed horror movie imaginable (from Friday the 13^th to My Bloody Valentine).  Because of this, Halloween 2 kinda got lost in the shuffle.  It’s a shame too because it’s a solid and effective movie that unfortunately gets overlooked whenever somebody starts talking fairly kick ass horror sequels.  This is partly because the shadow that the original Halloween cast was so large.  Halloween 2 is a noticeable step down from the first movie but that’s fine.  Any step down from a movie as great as Halloween is going to be a steep drop anyway.

Halloween 2 picks up exactly where the first one left off.  (Just like one of those old Saturday morning serials, it actually starts with the final moments of the last chapter.)  Maniac Michael Myers is still loose in Haddonfield; his impassioned physician Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence) is still looking for him; and his intended victim Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) is still freaked out.  She gets taken to the hospital for her injuries while Loomis relentlessly scours the streets for Michael.  Predictably, Michael finds his way to the hospital and slashes up teenagers, night watchmen, ambulance drivers, doctors, and of course lots of nurses until setting his sights on Laurie again.

I like this movie a lot mostly because Michael was allowed to get more creative with his kills this time out.  Throughout the course of the movie he plants a knife in a random chick’s chest, lands a hammer into some dumbass’s head, strangles a horndog, puts a hypodermic needle in the eye of a bimbo, sticks a scalpel in one chick’s back, and lifts her a foot off the ground and slit’s a cop’s throat.  He also makes inventive use of an IV to completely drain a victim of her blood.  Then a guy discovers the body and slips on the blood and hits his head!  Ingenious! 

The standout death scene though comes when Mikey Boy drowns some sexpot nurse in a scalding hot tub.  Although this scene was ripped off wholesale from Deep Red, it still rocks pretty hard.  I think I like this scene so much because it’s kinda like a cross between an 80’s slasher movie and a Roger Corman nurse movie.  This hot nurse should be watching her patients but she’s too busy humping to notice that Michael is about to turn her face into the consistency of astronaut ice cream.  I’d also be remiss if I didn’t mention that Pamela Susan Shoop looks mighty fine nekkid in the hot tub before Michael offed her.

Too many reviews that I’ve read of Halloween 2 say that it sucks because there are hardly any people in the hospital.  The fact is that Haddonfield is an extremely small town so the hospital probably would be empty.  A few years back my brother went to the hospital in the middle of the night with appendicitis and I stayed all night in the hospital with him.  Folks, this was a small town hospital and guess what; there was hardly anybody in the whole place!  All throughout the night, the empty corridors reminded me of Halloween 2.  Since I’ve seen firsthand an empty ass hospital in a small town; all the ninnies out there that poo-poo this movie because of the lack of people in the place can go spit.

A lot of negative things have also been said about Dick Warlock’s portrayal of Michael Myers.  I have to disagree.  He does a swell job and although he isn’t quite as scary as Nick Castle’s performance of Mikey in the original film, he has a few nice moments here and there.  My favorite comes towards the end of the movie when he nonchalantly walks through a glass door.

One thing completely bugs the shit out of this movie that no one ever mentions is the inclusion of the song “Mr. Sandman”.  This song serves no purpose whatsoever.  It’s not creepy or scary; it’s just one of those irritating oldies that get on your damn nerves.  Why the Hell is it even in the movie?  I mean Laurie calls Michael “The Boogeyman” not “The Sandman”.  If anything, they should be playing KC and the Sunshine Band’s “I’m Your Boogie Man”!

John Carpenter, who did such a magnificent job on the original declined to take the director’s chair, opting to only produce and co-write this installment.  Rick Rosenthal was hired to direct and he apes Carpenter’s style adequately enough.  Ironically, Carpenter was dissatisfied with Rosenthal’s work and went in and added some gory insert shots after the fact.  Since the kills are the best thing about the movie, it kinda just makes you wish that Carpenter had gone ahead and directed the damn thing himself.  Rosenthal does manage to build up a modicum of suspense and atmosphere, just not in the same league as JC.  (Rosenthal would later helm the abominable eighth entry in the series, Halloween:  Resurrection.) 

Acting-wise, Pleasence does another solid turn as Loomis.  He gets a bit unhinged now and then but nothing like his later work as the character.  He does earn points for keeping a straight face while mouthing a lot of gibberish about Samhain and some other nonsense about the Druids.  (This shit would later get incorporated into the immensely crappy Halloween 6:  The Curse of Michael Myers.)  Pleasence does hit some perfect notes during the film’s Bride of Frankenstein-ish ending.

The weak link in the movie is Laurie.  It’s not her fault though.  She was so likable and personable in the first film but here she just basically cries, whimpers, and screams.  Since Jamie Lee Curtis is one of the best screamers in the business, this is an acceptable trade-off.  However, one wishes that she had a meatier role.  That would come seventeen years later when she starred in Halloween 7.  (I refuse to call that shit H20.)

Also returning from the original is Charles Cyphers who does some woefully bad overacting.  (“YOU LET HIM OOOUUUUTTT!”)  Lance Guest makes a memorable appearance as the nice guy ambulance driver who befriends Laurie.  He later went on to star in The Last Starfighter, which ironically enough was directed by Nick Castle, the guy who played Michael Myers in the first movie.  You should also keep an eye out for Dana Carvey who pops up in a blink-and-you-miss-him role.

Carpenter produced the next sequel, Halloween 3:  Season of the Witch but unwisely left Michael Myers out of the film.

<Tomorrow’s Horror Franchise Movie:  Friday the 13^th (1980)>

Crazy Michael Gough runs a sanitarium out in the country where he gives dirty hippies lobotomies and turns them into somersaulting zombies that feel no pain.  He also has his chauffeur drive around in a James Bond style limo that has retractable blades that decapitates any unwanted loiterers on his property.  A long haired hippie shows up to Gough’s pad thinking he’s on a holiday getaway but really he’s the next potential patient.

Horror Hospital is one weirdo movie that is sometimes too moronic for its own good.  There’s plenty of bizarre shit going on in the flick but some of it is so flat out idiotic that it loses all credibility.  Like when the hero first walks into the Horror Hospital.  There are so many red flags that the Hospital is dangerous yet he ignores all of them.  First, he is shown to his room where the bed sheets are drenched in blood.  Does he get out of there?  No, he just asks for another room!  Then he completely disregards the fact that all the other “patients” are brain dead zombies with gigantic scars running down their foreheads.  After the part where he witnessed his travel agent getting decapitated AND STILL DIDN’T THINK TO GET THE FUCK OUT OF THERE, I kinda stopped having fun.  The main character’s blatant stupidity ruined what could’ve been a rather enjoyable flick.

The movie at least has an awesome opening scene.  That’s when Gough’s limo cuts off the heads of two unsuspecting patients.  If the whole movie had been based around the Decapitation Mobile, we may have had a winner.

AKA:  Computer Killers.  AKA:  Doctor Bloodbath.

Since the wife goes back to teaching school on Monday and the baby is due in just a few weeks after, I figured now would be the time for us to check out Halloween 2 and The Final Destination in 3-D before both of our schedules get jammed up.  Plus, it’s been ages since the two of us had seen a double feature since the demise of The Diamond State Drive-In.  So we fired up the Taurus and gunned her up to the Salisbury Stadium 16 for a Saturday Horror Sequel Double Feature.  Here’s the lowdown.

HALLOWEEN 2  (2009)  **

Now I wasn’t the biggest fan of Rob Zombie’s 2007 remake of the seminal John Carpenter classic Halloween, but I do still say that the flick had it’s moments and wasn’t too bad whenever Robby Boy wasn’t copying off The Master.  I think what drove me nuts with Zombie’s Halloween was that I was frequently comparing it to the infinitely superior Carpenter film.  Going in to this flick, I had some hope that it would be fairly decent since I would be more or less comparing it to the remake and not the original Halloween.  (Or for that matter, the original Halloween 2.) 

First off let me just say that I have a big problem with calling this thing “Halloween 2” because there was already a great movie called Halloween 2 that was made in 1981, which was a sequel to Halloween.  I know THIS Halloween 2 is a sequel to Rob Zombie’s Halloween 1 but to me, it’s just way too goofy to have 2 separate Halloween franchises.  Now whenever I tell somebody about that great scene in Halloween 2 I have to add, “Uh, no not the Rob Zombie one”.  I HATE that.

It makes more sense to me to just called the Halloween remake Halloween 9 and call this one Part 10, but that’s just me.  In fact, it would’ve made an infinite more amount of sense to have waited until Part 10 to make a remake, that way when you did Part 11; you could just call it Halloween 11 and make everyone think it was a Roman Numeral II.  For argument’s sake, I’ll just call this flick Halloween 2; just know that it irritates the living shit out of me to do so.

This Halloween 2 starts off almost exactly like the original Halloween 2 with Michael Myers (Tyler Mane) stalking Laurie (Scout Taylor-Compton) in a hospital on Halloween night.  Then the action abruptly switches to one year later with disturbed Laurie seeing a shrink (Margot Kidder!) because she has a lot of bad dreams.  Meanwhile Dr. Loomis (Malcolm McDowell) is on a book tour of his latest tell-all expose on Myers, which fittingly is released on Halloween.  In the book, he drops the bombshell that Laurie is indeed Michael’s sister.  Laurie reads the book and it screws with her mind so much that she decides to get drunk to forget it all.  Since this is Halloween night we are talking about, that means Michael is in town looking to hack her up.

Halloween 2 started off just fine.  Zombie crafted some surprisingly suspenseful scenes (like when Laurie gets locked into a parking attendant booth) and really delivered on the gore.  In the first half of the flick we get a severed head, butcher knife to the skull, axe to the back, eye slashing, deer antler impalement, dog eating, and face stomping.  Disappointingly, the gore dries up once Halloween night rolls around as Zombie starts making the killings bloodless and/or leaves them off screen entirely.

Likewise, the movie gets worse as it goes along and completely falls flat on its face once it enters the homestretch.  In addition to the deaths becoming increasingly weak, we also have to contend with an extremely annoying subplot that is supposed to explain “why” Michael is going after Laurie.  Okay, apparently Michael sees visions of his dead mother dressed in a white gown accompanied by a white horse who goads him into going after Laurie.  These scenes are goofy as all get out and seem more like an opportunity for Zombie to put his wife Sheri Moon Zombie into the movie than a logical reason for Michael to murder his sister. 

Then there’s Zombie’s continual mishandling of the Loomis character.  Again, Loomis is portrayed as a money grubbing asshole and not a caring physician.  Again, he’s given very little to do besides act like a prick.  Again, he just kinda shows up at the end so Michael can kill him.  (I don’t think I’m spoiling anything here because Loomis died in the first movie and came back, so I’m sure he’ll do likewise if there’s a Part 3.  Unless Zombie remakes Season of the Witch that is.)  The final confrontation between Loomis and Michael is particularly lackluster and anticlimactic. 

Also, Zombie goes overboard on Laurie’s dream sequences.  Rob:  trippy psychedelic shit doesn’t really belong in a Halloween movie.  Save that shit for one of your music videos, buddy.

And you know, as much as Zombie previously stated that this Halloween 2 was not a remake of the 1981 Halloween 2, then why would he stage a major murdering spree in a hospital, the same setting where the original Part 2 took place?  Not that I mind.  I mean the hospital massacre scene IS the best thing the movie has going for it.  Zombie also cleverly lifts things from Part 4 (the ambulance escape scene as well as the idea that a Myers relative may take up Michael murderous mantle) and Part 5 (there’s a Halloween party in a barn plus the fact that Michael lives the life of a long-haired drifter during the other 364 days of the year that aren’t October 31^st).  For all his talk about making this movie “his own”, he certainly did swipe a lot of stuff from the other installments.

I will fess up and say that Halloween 10 err… 2 is marginally better than its predecessor.  The first half is moody and atmospheric (as opposed to the bland and rushed second half) and I liked the restrained use of John Carpenter’s classic Halloween theme.  Another plus is that Mane actually GETS how to play Michael Myers now.  His portrayal of the slow moving and emotionless Michael is miles better than his previous turn as the masked killer.  He actually feels more like Michael Myers and not that White Trash Jason wannabe from the remake.  Of course, he does have to play a lot of his scenes with Ghost Mommy and her White Horse though.

And then there’s the random Weird Al cameo, which is as hysterical as it is bizarre.   

Overall, Halloween 2 is a middle-of-the-road entry in the series.  The kills are quality for the most part and the nudity is plentiful so those bases were covered.  Had Zombie 86’ed all the dreams and Ghost Mom shit (not to mention made Loomis a likable character), it could’ve stood shoulder to shoulder with Part 7.  It could’ve been worse I guess:  Busta Rhymes could’ve been in it.

A horny coroner gets the best line of the movie after ogling a hot dead chick:  “I got wood just Ziplocking her up!”

After the lights went up on Halloween 2, me and the wife headed to the concession stand (“Let’s All Go to the Lobby”) to refill our Big Ass Soda and get some Twizzlers before slapping on our 3-D glasses for: 

THE FINAL DESTINATION IN 3-D  (2009)  ***

It is my hope that 2009 will be remembered for being the year that marked the return of the 3-D horror movie.  It will probably be best known however as the year Hollywood made clever use of the word “The” in the title of a fourth film in a successful franchise.  Earlier in the year, The Fast and the Furious Part 4 dropped the “Thes” out of its title and simply became Fast and Furious.  The latest installment in the Final Destination franchise on the other hand simply ADDED a “The” to its title to make it THE Final Destination; implying that this will be the last in the series.

Sure, and if you believe that, you’ll believe that Jason Goes to Hell was REALLY the Final Friday. 

I don’t know about you all, but I LOVED me Final Destination 2.  It was one of the greatest Teenage Shish-Kabob Movies of the New Millennium.  While Final Destination 1 and 3 are good and all, it’s 2 that’s balls out brilliant.  What made me want to see The Final Destination so badly was that it was directed by David R. Ellis, the man who also did FD2 (not to mention Snakes on a Plane). 

That and it’s in MUTHAFUCKIN’ 3-D. 

Now I do have to chastise New Line, the studio responsible for the Final Destination pictures here for a second.  Why on God’s green Earth did you make Part 4 in 3-D when everybody knows the classic Part 3’s are all in 3-D?  Final Destination 3-D could’ve been whispered in the same breath as Friday the 13^th Part 3-D, Jaws 3-D, Amityville 3-D, and Spy Kids 3-D but….NOOOOO!   You had to make Part FOUR in 3-D.  Where’s the logic in that?  The only way that it would make sense is if you made Final Destination 4-D where not only images came out of the screen, but REAL blood splashed on them too.  (Think the Shamu show at Sea World except with protoplasm.)  As it is, we have to settle for the title The Final Destination in 3-D.  Doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, does it?

The Final Destination in 3-D is just like the other three movies.  Someone sees a premonition of mass death.  They, along with several others narrowly avoid death.  Later, death comes after them and kills them in a myriad of gory Mouse Trap inspired ways.

Seriously, this movie is exactly like the others.  In fact, I think some of the dialogue is exactly the same.  The only thing that’s different is the site of the initial accident (this time it’s at a Nascar race instead of a rollercoaster, freeway, or airplane) and the way people die. 

The screenplay must’ve been written like Mad Libs:  (Boy’s Name) sees (Girl’s Name) die at a (Place) in a premonition and prevents her death.  Later, (Same Girl’s Name) dies when a random flying (Sharp Object) goes straight into her (Body Part) and kills her.

Because The Final Destination in 3-D is exactly like its predecessors, the only way to accurately judge the film is on two things:  The body count and the 3-D effects.  We get: 

• 3-D flying screwdriver.
• 3-D flying tire.
• 3-D white trash couple being cut in half.
• 3-D motor to the lap.
• 3-D splintered bench through the mouth.
• 3-D pole through the stomach.
• 3-D flying flaming severed head.
• 3-D pedicure.
• 3-D flying rock to the eye.
• 3-D chunks of human torso squished through a chain link fence.
• 3-D extreme underwater enema.
• 3-D flying cork.
• 3-D 3-D movie of death.
• 3-D chick ground up through the escalator.

Now on the basis of death and destruction, Final Destin… excuse me, THE Final Destination in 3-D is easily the least of the series.  Just because it’s not quite up to snuff with the previous films doesn’t mean there isn’t some good stuff here.  Of all the gory deaths, the escalator scene was probably my favorite.  Now when I was a kid, I used to have an acute fear of escalators.  I would have horrible nightmares where my shoelace got caught in the steps and I’d get sucked in feet first screaming.  The Final Destination brings this childhood fear of mine to the big screen.  Not only that, it presents it in 3-D no less.

The other kills are adequate but they didn’t make me jump or say “Oh damn” or anything.  Likewise, the 3-D didn’t really bring the gore sequences fully to life (death?).  They enhanced them to a certain degree (like the chain link fence scene) but they didn’t fly off the screen the way My Bloody Valentine did.  But… even the worst 3-D adds fun to a movie just for the sheer novelty of the 3-D effects.   The Final Destination in 3-D’s effects, while no means great, definitely bumped the flick up a notch or two.  And that, combined with the generous amount of goodwill I’ve built up for the series over the years, was enough for me to give it a positive review.

Robert DeNiro stars in this atrocious sequel to Greetings.  This time his peeping tom character sets out to make a voyeuristic porno with himself as the star.  It doesn’t work out so he then joins a black militant theater troupe who perform a play called “Be Black Baby” where they take the white audience members to the ghetto, put them in blackface, make them eat collard greens, rape them, then have them beaten by the police.  After the theater company gets gunned down while trying to infiltrate a middle class apartment building, DeNiro retaliates by blowing up the place.  He then goes on television where he says the title of the movie.

You know, I have a high tolerance for politically incorrect stuff.  I mean it takes a lot to offend me.  Hi Mom definitely succeeded in offending me.  The “Be Black Baby” segments of the film contained some of the most tasteless things I’ve ever seen in a motion picture.  It had the potential to be funny but director Brian DePalma films the scene completely straight.  There’s no “satire” at work here, just a bunch of ugliness.  And the way he filmed the scene got on my damn nerves.  It’s all shot in black and white in one continuous handheld take, which makes everything look like the Blair Witch Project. 

This scene is one big train wreck but I guess it may have been forgivable if the rest of the flick had been funny.  It isn’t.  On top of that, the movie is about as boring as watching dog piss dry on concrete.  I fell asleep THREE times while trying to slog through this mess.  Hi Mom is definitely one of the worst hemorrhoids on celluloid I’ve ever sat through.

I thought Brian DePalma was a good director.  I mean this is the guy who made Sisters, Carrie, and Scarface we’re talking about here.  I guess Hi Mom is just further proof that the man can’t direct comedy to save his life.  (For further proof watch Bonfire of the Vanities.)

AKA:  Blue Manhattan.  AKA:  Confessions of a Peeping John.  AKA:  Son of Greetings.

Hardbodies 1 was a better than average 80’s T & A Sex Comedy.  While it was no Blazing Saddles in the “comedy” department, it delivered more than its fair share of T & A.  Hardbodies 2 on the other hand only features about half the amount of ta-tas and about a third of the laughs.

I don’t even know if the plot is relevant here but I’d like to at least address how dumb it is.  What happens is that Scotty (not the same guy from the first movie) and his buddy (not the same guy from the first movie either) are now skin flick movie stars who go to Greece to film their latest picture.  Suddenly and incoherently, the “real” movie switches randomly back and forth to the “reel” movie.  Why this was done, I have no idea.  Maybe the filmmakers realized that they only had enough plot for half a movie so they decided to film the crew for the other half of the flick.  Whatever the reasons were, the results are just plain stupid.

Another thing that bugged me about Hardbodies 2 was the fact that the filmmakers didn’t give a shit about continuity.  All of a sudden the beach bum guys from the first movie are now softcore porn stars.  I guess the director thought the audience wouldn’t notice because the characters were being played by two completely different actors.  Since I watched both Hardbodies movies back to back, this blatant disregard for continuity was jarring to say the least.  The only two returning cast members from the first film are the Waylon Jennings look-alike and Roberta (Caged Heat) Collins.  That’s like making Wrath of Khan and re-casting the Kirk and Spock roles and having Sulu and Chekhov being played by the same guys.  (Okay, that analogy’s not like 100% accurate, but you get the idea.)

As stupid as most of the movie is, Hardbodies 2 was actually watchable due to the fact that it had a couple nice up-and-coming Hardbodies in it.  First and foremost is Fabiana Udenio.  If you don’t know her, she was the chick who played Alotta Fagina in Austin Powers.  She looks really hot in this, as does a young and yummy Brenda Bakke.  Both ladies would go on to do several more sequels in their time (Udenio:  Robocop 2 and Bride of Re-Animator.  Bakke:  Hot Shots Part Deux and Under Siege 2:  Dark Territory.); all of them better than this one.

Scotty (Grant Cramer from Killer Klowns from Outer Space) is a blonde beach bum that gets evicted from his rat-hole apartment.  It’s OK though because he’s got a hot girlfriend who doesn’t mind the fact that he’s homeless.  Scotty runs into a trio of obnoxious forty-something rich dudes who pay him to find hot beach babes they can party with.  When one of the geezer jag-offs put the moves on Scotty’s girlfriend, he gets P.O.ed and has to win her back from the lecherous asshole.

Hardbodies is a Skinamax classic.  The film has a special place in my heart mostly because I have warm memories of catching it on Skinamax in the middle of the night as a youngling.  I also remember ogling the video box more than once at the local video store as a lad too.  (Whenever my parents weren’t looking that is.)  That haze of nostalgia probably added a Half Star or more to the movie.

Basically, if you’ve seen one 80’s T & A Sex Comedy, you’ve seen ‘em all.  The only way to judge them is by the T & A, the sex, and the comedy.  There are scads of boobies on display (almost 50 bare exposures), and a lot of sex to be found in Hardbodies, but there aren’t a heck of a lot of laughs.  That’s fine by me though because the hooters you do see are Grade A cantaloupes. 

You know a lot of people told me when I was growing up that I looked liked the red-headed freckle-faced geek sidekick (Courtney Gains from Children of the Corn) from this movie.  Sure, I did have red hair and I did have freckles, but that’s where the similarities end.  All I have to say about that is that the geek gets laid at the end of the movie, so there.  

The old geezer with the Waylon Jennings beard gets the best line of the movie when he wakes up with a hangover and says, “My liver is staging a major coup d’etat.” 

Gary Cooper stars in his all time best role as Will Kane, a lawman who gets married to the beautiful Quaker chick (Grace Kelly) on the day he retires.  As he’s about to leave for his honeymoon, he learns that the mad dog killer he put away five years ago is returning to town on the noon train.  Kane decides to stick around to fend off the no-good varmint and his gang of thugs.  He figures he can’t do it alone though, so he goes around town asking the men folk to join his posse and help defend the town.  Trouble is; everyone in town is either yellow or worthless.  With no one to aid him, Kane is left to fight the nefarious gunmen alone.

I need to ask myself a question here:  Why did it take me so long to see this movie?  I love movies and I love westerns but I have never seen this movie before.  High Noon is not only one of the best westerns ever made, it’s one of the best films ever made.  Again:  Why did it take me so long to see this movie?

High Noon is filled with tension and suspense stemming from the arrival of the imminent bad guys but the thing that makes it a classic is the performance of Gary Cooper.  He ranks right up there with John Wayne in Rio Bravo, Clint Eastwood in A Fistful of Dollars, and Alan Ladd in Shane as one of the greatest western performances ever.  What makes his character Will Kane different is that he’s not a hero in the traditional western sense.  He’s not a cowboy filled with swagger and bravado like Wayne and unlike Eastwood he isn’t a steely-eyed badass.  Cooper is an everyman.  He’s scared just like the civilians he’s been hired to protect.  What makes him a hero is his willingness to do the right thing when no one else will.  Cooper is a man of few words and when he doesn’t speak, his sorrowful eyes say everything.  He deservedly won an Oscar for his stellar work. 

Then there’s the supporting cast.  Kelly is dazzling as Kane’s resentful wife.  She’s also one of the hottest Quaker chicks I’ve ever seen.  Lloyd Bridges also does a fine job as Kane’s uppity deputy and Lon Chaney Jr. and Harry Morgan put in excellent turns as cowardly townsfolk.

Fred (The Day of the Jackal) Zinnemann’s direction is flawless.  He wrings every bit of suspense possible from the film.  Everything is expertly paced (the flick is filmed in “real time” more or less), every second counts; and as a result, there is not an ounce of fat on this bad boy.  The cinematography by Floyd Crosby is some of the best you’ll ever see and it’s bewildering to think that this is the same guy who shot Attack of the Crab Monsters, Reform School Girl, and The Screaming Skull just a few years later.  

High Noon is Number 1 with a bullet on The Video Vacuum Top Ten Films of 1952, sitting pretty on top of The Quiet Man.

Jimmy Cliff comes to Jamaica to become a reggae singer.  Broke and out of work, he turns to singing in a choir and doing odd jobs for an asshole preacher.  When some dude tries to steal his bicycle, he slices that sonofabitch up with a switchblade.  After getting publicly flogged, Cliff cuts a record that doesn’t exactly burn up the charts.  Frustrated, he turns to selling ganja to make money and winds up going on a killing spree; murdering three cops.  Ironically, it’s then that his album starts becoming a hit.  Cliff goes around shooting more people and generally acting like a jerk before the cops pin him down and blow him away.

The Harder They Come already had one strike against it in my book because of the constant reggae music.  I pretty much hate reggae but Cliff’s music is a Hell of lot more tolerable than say Bob Marley’s.  Although the title tune isn’t bad, I got tired of hearing the same two or three songs played over and over again.

Another obstacle I had to overcome while watching this flick was the impenetrable Jamaican accents.  I could only understand about every 8^th word most of the actors were saying.  At least the plot was relatively low maintenance so it was easy to follow.

As middling as most of the movie was, I will say that Cliff does have a modicum of screen presence and keeps you watching.  Unfortunately, his character gets downright loathsome by the end of the movie.  I was onboard with Cliff trying to get his record made but I lost all sympathy for him once he started gunning down cops and shooting defenseless naked women. 

The Harder They Come is highly regarded in some circles.  I just don’t get it.  If you really want to watch a good movie about Jamaican drug dealers, check out Predator 2 instead.

Anthony Perkins plays yet another emotionally disturbed man with severe parental issues in this extremely lame Made-for-TV movie from producer Aaron (Charlie’s Angels) Spelling and director Curtis (Ruby) Harrington.  Perkins stars as this schmo named Allan who stupidly let his father burn to death in a house fire.  Wracked with guilt, he becomes psychosomatically blind and has to be institutionalized.  When his vision goes from pitch black to blurry, he is released into the care of his sister (Julie Harris) who runs a boardinghouse.  She was burned trying to save their father in the fire and as a result has to wear a flesh-toned faceplate.  She takes on a mysterious boarder who begins messing with poor Allan by throwing his voice and trying to push him down stairs.  Of course, no one believes Allan and they naturally assume it’s time for him to go back to the nuthouse. 

Will Allan be sent back to the funny farm?  Will Allan uncover the sadistic boarder’s identity?  Will you fall asleep before then?

Perkins’ solid, if all too familiar performance is the only thing that makes this turd remotely worth watching.  Since it’s a TV movie, you’re guaranteed there won’t be much in the way of T & A or blood and guts.  This would’ve been forgivable if there was actually any suspense, but there isn’t.  How Awful About Allan is slow moving, boring, and just plain stupid.  And if you can’t see the painfully obvious “twist” ending coming from a mile away; then you’re the blind one.

How awful indeed.

A bunch of idiot British “teens” get bored by their hip, mod, swinging party and decide to go check out a haunted house.  Because no American in their right mind would watch a stupid horror movie without a washed-up American has-been leading man, Frankie Avalon is also part of the group.  On the way over to the house, he tells everyone that it’s supposedly haunted by a psycho who murdered a bunch of people and then committed suicide twenty years earlier.  After a lot of inane shenanigans, one of the “teens” gets hacked up by an unseen killer.  The other “kids” go apeshit and cover up the murder and split.  Eventually, the psycho starts stalking the “teens” who fled the scene and picking them off one by one.

The silly title wrongly sets you up into thinking that this is going to be a haunted house movie but it’s really more along the lines of I Know What You Did Last Summer.  Except that it’s so bad that it makes I Know What You Did Last Summer look like Scream by comparison.  Man, if you thought Frankie’s beach party movies were bad, wait till you see this one.  It’s almost exactly like those beach flicks except everyone speaks in a British accent (except Frankie of course) and a couple people get stabbed to death.

There are numerous shortcomings that this flick shoulders.  From the sluggish pacing, to the dingy cinematography; everything is more or less bottom of the barrel.  Special mention must be made of the awful British cast.  These are some of the most irritating British farts I’ve ever seen in a movie.  Especially that one chick who kept yapping about getting some coffee.  I hate cunts like that who go on and on about grabbing Starbucks.

The only thing worth a shit in this movie are the slashings  Although you don’t get any gore, there is an abundance of cool looking 70’s blood (you know the kind that looks like red Sherman Williams paint).  I was tempted to give the movie One Star for the longest time (practically since the start of the film) but the scene where Frankie Avalon gets stabbed in the crotch was worth the extra Half Star if you ask me. 

Director Michael Armstrong did a much better job with his next film, Mark of the Devil.

AKA:  Horror House.  AKA:  The Dark.

When I was a kid, House was my jump-off.  I first saw it at the now long gone Movies 6 in Salisbury and it was love at first sight.  The deft mix of horror and humor was right up my seven year-old alley.  It also didn’t hurt that it starred The Greatest American Hero himself, William Katt.  As a kid, The Greatest American Hero was one of my favorite shows (right up there with The A-Team and Knight Rider), so seeing Katt battle zombies, trolls, winged skulls, fatty monsters, and undead marlins (clearly the inspiration for the singing Billy Bass) was pretty freaking awesome.  Two decades later, House is still a heck of a good time.

Katt stars as a Stephen Kingish author with severe writer’s block who is working on a book about his experiences in Vietnam.  When his aunt dies, he moves into her House, which also happens to be the place where his son mysteriously disappeared years earlier.  While writing (and having a bunch of Nam flashbacks), he gets attacked by a greasy closet monster (that only comes out at midnight) and enlists the help of his fat neighbor (the fat George Wendt) to take a picture of it.  Katt also starts having visions of his missing son and soon realizes that his undead Nam buddy (Richard Moll, who is excellent) is haunting the House and holding his kid prisoner.

House is pretty much like Poltergeist directed by Oliver Stone.

As a kid, I really responded to the goofy looking monsters and black humor (the scene where Katt has to flush a disembodied hand down the toilet is priceless).  As an adult, I appreciated the subtext of the movie as well.  Basically, Katt’s character has to face his inner demons (symbolized by the Nam flashbacks and the zombie GI Joe) as well as the outer demons of the House.  Haunted House movies are tricky to pull off because the main character needs an excuse to stay in the House.  I mean if I was in a haunted House, I’d get out of there ASAFP and the movie would be over at the 10 minute mark.  But in House, the main character stays in the House in order to find his son.  Sure, this device was also used in Poltergeist where the Freelings stuck it out to save Carol Anne, but at least House features none of those hokey feel-good Spielbergian touches that hampered that flick.

I also have to give it up to director Steve Miner for really going all out and making one of the best horror comedies of the 80’s.  Steve proves that he knows how to do the funny (like the rejects at Katt’s book signing) and the scary (Katt’s climb down the Medicine Cabinet of Doom), as well as both at the same time (Katt’s run-in with the purple-faced tub-of-lard monster).  Since Miner's previous film was the seminal Friday the 13^th Part 3 in 3-D, we already know the man can do the Chase-the-Main-Character-All-Throughout-the-House Finale like no one in the business.  In House, he delivers yet another awesome variation on that theme except this time it’s a Killer Army Soldier Zombie instead of Jason doing the stalking. 

An unrelated sequel followed the next year which everyone seems to hate except me.  Then The Horror Show was released the following year and was known as House 3 in every place EXCEPT the US.  By the time the dreadful House 4 finally rolled around, people had stopped giving a shit about this series.  Regardless of how erratic the sequels are, House 1 is still one of the coolest movies of the 80’s and is highly recommended for fans of that beloved decade.

House ranks Number 9 on The Video Vacuum Top Ten Films of the Year for 1986, right in between Back to School and The Color of Money.

Okay, so I wasn’t going to see this because the previews didn’t really look all that funny.  Since it’s been getting some good reviews and I had nothing else better to do on an overcast Saturday afternoon, I thought I’d go and check it out.  The reason I wound up liking The Hangover I think was due to the fact that I had zero expectations going in and that all of the “clean” jokes were mostly in the trailer.

Basically it’s Very Bad Things Meets Dude Where’s My Car.  Four guys (Bradley Cooper and three other dudes I’ve never heard of) go to Vegas for a bachelor party and What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas because they accidentally take some “roofies” and can’t remember what they did last night.  The groom-to-be also disappears, so the guys have to the search all over Sin City to find him and try to remember the shenanigans they got into.  Said shenanigans involve one of the guys marrying an escort (the still hot and showing off her rack Heather Graham), stealing Mike Tyson’s tiger, and illegally commandeering a police car.

The first half of the flick is frequently hilarious but the laughs start to dry up once you start to realize that no one could ever get into so much shit in such a small amount of time.  That’s OK because I think the ratio of funny-to-unfunny jokes was about 2 to 1, so it’s all good.  Like the main characters, I’ll probably forget everything that happened in the flick by tomorrow (it’s funny, just not particularly memorable).  Still good enough for a low-to-mid-range *** rating though. 

Howard (Robert Gribben) is a nerdy mama’s boy that drives around in his work van and picks up ugly dumpy-looking chicks hitchhiking.  Initially Howard seems tame enough, but whenever the girls mention that they are running away from their mothers, he snaps and proceeds to rape and strangle them.  Russell (The Professor!) Johnson stars as the caring cop who tries to bring the sicko to justice.

Although Hitch Hike to Hell sounds promising at first, it features way too much tease and not enough sleaze.  The main problem is that the girls are all dogs.  Words just cannot describe how hideous these chicks look.  Luckily, most of them do show off their racks, so that’s a good thing.  

The film is largely a failure because Irvin (The Monster of Piedras Blancas) Berwick directed it without an iota of tension.  All the attacks are more or less the same and most of the violence happens off screen.  Berwick does deliver a pretty funny scene when a gay guy hitches a ride with the killer, but for the most part, Hitch Hike to Hell is just one long monotonous bore.  There is a great country & western title song that you have to hear to believe.  That thing is freakin’ hilarious.  It says a lot though when a country song is the best part of your sexploitation movie.

Gribben fares OK as the hitchhiker hating geek and adequately displays his character’s psychotic tendencies.  Johnson is fun to watch in his brief role, even though he looks like he’d rather be taking a three hour cruise.  His presence lends the flick it’s only sliver of credibility, so I hope he was at least well paid for his services.

Le Ly (Hiep Thi Le) is a young Vietnamese girl who spends most of her days working in the fields and being naïve and stuff.  One day, her brothers join up with the Viet Cong and she decides to help out by booby trapping some soldiers.  Their buddies get pissed about that and decide to give her shock treatments and toss a snake down her blouse for the Hell of it.  Afterwards, the Viet Cong get pissed at her too and they rape her for fraternizing with the enemy.  That makes her so mad that she moves to Saigon to make a living selling cigarettes to American G.I.’s.  She ends up having a couple bastard kids which brings great shame on her family to make her karma even worse.  Things start looking up for poor Le Ly when she meets a nice American soldier (Tommy Lee Jones) who marries her and brings her home to the US.  Eventually, he starts showing his true colors and acting like a psychopath; terrorizing her and her brood of children.

So basically it’s just one big Depress-O-Thon, courtesy of director Oliver Stone.

Heaven and Earth is clearly a lesser film in Stone’s canon.  While I appreciate the fact that he was trying to tell the story from the Vietnamese perspective, that doesn’t necessarily make it entertaining.  It’s nowhere near the same league as Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July.  A lot of the film’s problems stem from Hiep Thi Le’s lukewarm performance.  She’s clearly out of her depth going toe-to-toe with such a seasoned veteran as Jones and although she does an adequate job, she just doesn’t have the chops needed to hold the story together.

That’s OK though because Jones is awesome and the scene where he threatens to blow his brains out in front of his wife is some of the best acting he’s ever done.  His scenes are great (although the domestic strife scenes reek of Lifetime Movie clichés) and the flick is worth seeing just for his dynamite performance alone.  On the downside, he doesn’t show up until the movie’s half over.  That’s right; that means you got to sit through a whole lot of depressing You-Go-Girl stuff about Le Ly overcoming life’s obstacles before Jones goes totally bonkers.  (Jones and Stone teamed up the next year for the seminal Natural Born Killers.)

Stone did a fine job with the action aspect of the story as well as capturing the feel of 60’s Americana to a tee.  I also dug the cool stylistic touches he brought to the film; particularly in the early scenes where he didn’t show the American soldier’s faces.  (Kinda like what Spielberg did with the government agents in ET.)  Stone also wrote the screenplay for this bad boy and came up with some pretty sweet dialogue like, “I know he’s dead… I can feel it in my womb!”

Hard Ticket to Hawaii is perhaps the greatest Andy Sidaris movie ever made.  It features everything that a great Andy Sidaris movie should have; namely topless gut-toting Playboy Playmates, softcore sex scenes, Kung Fu, remote control helicopters, scuzzy drug dealers, studly guys who can’t shoot straight, beautiful locations, Jacuzzis, random guys driving motorcycles and ATV’s, people sipping champagne on a yacht, comic relief henchmen, James Bond references, shit blowing up, etc.   As an added bonus, there is also a subplot involving a killer mutant cancer-ridden snake.

Folks, how many movies can you name off the top of your head that feature killer mutant cancer-ridden snakes?

I first caught this flick when I was ten years old on Skinamax at about two in the morning and have never forgotten it.  Hard Ticket to Hawaii served as my introduction to the world of Andy Sidaris and that’s also another reason why it has a special place in my heart.  Nobody combines tits and guns like Andy Sidaris and in Hard Ticket to Hawaii, he really outdoes himself.  We get a lot of tits and a lot of guns.

The main problem with Andy’s films is that they are all interchangeable and it’s hard to tell one from another.  Also, the stuff that doesn’t revolve around tits and guns isn’t nearly as much fun.  I’ve seen every single one of Andy’s flicks from the 80’s and 90’s and despite their varying quality they all get *** from me just for the sheer number of naked Playmates and explosions.  

The thing about Hard Ticket to Hawaii that sets it apart from the rest of Sidaris’ work is the fucking awesome killer mutant cancer-ridden snake.  Andy doesn’t get a lot of credit as a “director” director but the scene where the snake pops out of the toilet ranks right up there with the shower scene in Psycho.  Other than that there’s a pretty cool scene involving a razor-lined Frisbee as well as the bat shit insane part where a blow-up doll gets bazooka’ed to death!

Andy also knows how to write some fucking brilliant dialogue too.  Not many of the lines make a whole lot of sense (“One man’s dream is another man’s lunch!”) but I got to tell you, Sidaris is a gifted writer.  Who else could write the line, “If brains were bird shit, you’d have a clean cage!” and get away with it?  

Picasso Trigger was the next in the series.

Russ (West Side Story) Tamblyn stars as an undercover cop posing as a teenage marijuana dealer (making this the 21 Jump Street of it’s day) who is out to bust the drug trade at an All-American school.  He moves in on the teenage gang (called “The Wheeler-Dealers”) led by John Drew Barrymore and eventually has to shoot heroin to prove he’s a real juvenile delinquent. 

Directed by Jack (The Creature from the Black Lagoon) Arnold, High School Confidential is a campy and entertaining juvenile delinquent movie.  It’s got more than its share of lulls and while it’s not great or anything, how can you possibly not like a movie that contains:

• Jerry Lee Lewis playing piano and singing the title tune on the back of a pickup truck.

• Mamie Van Doren as the sexed-up auntie who tries to seduce her juvenile delinquent nephew.  (“Relatives should always kiss each other hello and goodbye!”)

• Marijuana dealers that would look at home in Reefer Madness.  (“I’m grazing for grass!”)

• Terrible beatnik poetry.  (“Tomorrow is Dragsville.  Tomorrow is a King-Sized Drag!”)

• Michael (I Was a Teenage Werewolf) Landon as a drag racer.

• Jackie (Uncle Fester!!!) Coogan as a heroin pusher.

• Lyle (Plan 9 from Outer Space) Talbot as a square-jawed policeman.

• More slang than you can shake a stick at.  (“Can you dig it?”)
   

A jackass nobleman (Christopher Plummer) loses his daughter Serena (Helena Bonham Carter) in a game of dice and then promptly kills himself.  Serena gets carted off to live with the pompous Lord Vulcan (Marcus Gilbert from Army of Darkness) who won her hand in marriage and they slowly grow to respect one another.  However, his bitchy mother (Diana Rigg) hates Serena and tries everything in her power to get her axed from the family.

I’m not much for these corset-ploitation movies, but I kinda dug A Hazard of Hearts.  What really made the flick watchable were the performances.  Ever since Fight Club, I’ve sorta had a thing a thing for Helena Bonham Carter, so it was nice for me to see her playing the innocent ingénue.  Rigg played her role to bitchy perfection and chewed on the scenery with aplomb.  It was Plummer though who gave the best performance in the movie as the noble-dude who recklessly gambled away everything he owned.  Too bad he blows his brains out ten minutes into the flick.

A Hazard of Hearts has all the standard issue clichés you’d expect from a bodice-ripper like this one.  There are fancy dinner parties, disgusting highwaymen, dueling (both pistols AND swords), and a bunch of frowny people falling in love.  It was all slightly better than I expected and the pacing moved along briskly for the first half of the film.  I guess the credit there has to go to director John (Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry) Hough, who spices up the early scenes with some cheeky humor. 

Sadly, the flick gets sillier and sillier as it goes on until it gets flat out stupid near the end.  (Seriously, I was expecting to see the kitchen sink by the time the climax rolled around.)  If you have a high tolerance for these sort of stuffy British shenanigans though, you’re going to fucking love this shit.  Whenever you get bored, you can have fun spotting all of the Bond movie vets in the cast like Fiona (A View to a Kill) Fullerton, Edward (Never Say Never Again) Fox, and of course, Diana (On Her Majesty’s Secret Service) Rigg.

Hough went on to direct Howling 4:  The Original Nightmare the next year.

Daniel Farrands, the man who wrote what is probably the worst Halloween sequel ever made, directed this so-so documentary on the cinematic life and times of Jason Vorhees.  Farrands gathered a decent line-up of people associated with the Friday the 13th movies (from the original producer/director Sean S. Cunningham to the remake director Marcus Nispel) to sit and chat about the series and give their various takes about their experience in making the films as well as what Friday the 13^th means to them.  All of the actors who’ve played Jason over the years also talk a bit about playing everyone’s favorite masked maniac.

As a die hard fan of the Friday the 13^th series this was an OK trip down memory lane.  A lot of the material is regurgitated from Peter Bracke’s excellent book, Crystal Lake Memories and I’d highly suggest you read that instead of watching this doc.  At least that book interviewed Kevin Bacon, Steve Miner, Dana Kimmell, and Corey Feldman.  I could’ve also done without host Tom Savani’s constant mugging and the gratuitous promotion for the new remake.

What makes His Name Was Jason fun to watch though is seeing how well (or in some cases not so well) the females of the series have been preserved.  Adrienne King, Amy Steel, Deborah Vorhees, Lar Park Lincoln, and the two twins from Part IV all still look pretty good if you ask me, although I would’ve loved to see what Kirsten Baker from Part 2 looks like now.  His Name Was Jason isn’t the definitive documentary that fans of the series might’ve hoped for (I really wished Farrands had concentrated more on each individual film instead of painting the series in one broad stroke), but it’s a fun way to kill 90 minutes.  All in all, it’s more of a glorified DVD extra than anything else.